Simone de Beauvoir, Les Mandarins [The Mandarins]

Vassilis Manoussakis (University of the Peloponnese)

Ed. by David Houston Jones, University of Exeter
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.07: French Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kate Averis (Universidad de Antioquia), Hugo Azerad (University of Cambridge), Patrick ffrench (King's College London), Edward Forman (University of Bristol), Akane Kawakami (Birkbeck, University of London), Siobhán McIlvanney (King's College London), Sinan Richards (King's College London), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1954

Places

France (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Les Mandarins [The Mandarins] (1954) is Simone de Beauvoir’s most critically acclaimed novel, exploring the ethical obligations of the intellectual toward a society in crisis. Centred on post-war French society, it takes as its main concern the intellectual elite, the mandarins of the title. By focusing on a group of people with a certain lifestyle, Beauvoir grasps the opportunity to highlight her own personal concerns; thus the novel explores post-war views on Socialism and Communism, fictionalizes the resentment against American imperialist policies and the dropping of the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, more generally, the intellectuals’ attitude toward the society they live in. Things had been different …

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1141 words

Citation: Manoussakis, Vassilis. "Les Mandarins". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 January 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11127, accessed 24 November 2024.]

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